Belcourt Theatre To Show Controversial Sony Pictures Film ‘The Interview’

The Belcourt Theatre was one of many independent cinemas to sign a petition to show “The Interview” Christmas Day. Credit: Belcourt Theatre

Nashville’s independent movie theater will be showing the film that has garnered everything from terrorism threats to presidential support in recent days. “The Interview,” a comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korea’s leader, will be screening at the Belcourt starting Christmas Day.

Belcourt executive director Stephanie Silverman says the theater wasn’t originally interested in the movie — it was geared toward multiplex theaters, not independent cinemas — but she started to take notice after its cancellation.

“This is the kind of thing we do,” she says. “We show films that maybe not everyone loves, that certainly provoke conversation and discussion and sometimes are controversial.”

“There were people who tried to shut that film down,” she says. “In this country, we allow those kinds of films to screen and provoke the kind of conversation that they are meant to provoke.”

Silverman says the Belcourt is taking the broad threats seriously, by alerting the Nashville police department and beefing up its own security team. But it’s not overly alarmed, she says — no theater that she knows of has gotten a specific threat.

Update, 5:43 p.m.: According to various news reports, the Premiere 6 in Murfreesboro and the Franklin Theatre will also be screening the film.

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Emily Siner is an enterprise reporter at WPLN. She has worked at the Los Angeles Times and NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., and her written work was recently published in Slices Of Life, an anthology of literary feature writing. Born and raised in the Chicago area, she is a graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On Twitter: @SinerSays